Cost estimates raise doubts over construction of a new Manhattan bus terminal

Large ceiling panels missing at the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York on Thursday as commuters made their way around the aging building.

Port Authority commissioners balked on Thursday at plans for a new Manhattan bus terminal that would cost as much as $10 billion.

Some board members pushing for a new terminal said they believed the project could be completed at a lower cost. They also urged consideration of alternatives beyond the five options presented at the commissioners’ meeting on Thursday — all of which involve putting up a new building near or at the current location in midtown Manhattan. That prompted one New York commissioner to float an idea, met by skepticism from some of his colleagues: build it in New Jersey.

The presentation and testy debate among commissioners was the culmination of nearly a year of research by Port Authority staff and outside consultants who had the task of coming up with ways to replace the current cramped and dated building, a source of jokes for comedians and frustration for commuters. Until the meeting on Thursday, commissioners appeared to have coalesced around the idea of a new station. But the cost estimates of the five options — from $7.5 billion to $10.5 billion — appeared to take commissioners of the bi-state agency by surprise, exposing new divisions.

In the end, the board decided to form a new subcommittee that would continue to study the issue and come up with viable options by the end of the year. Underlying the decision was an acknowledgement that the current options, as proposed, would be a huge financial drain on the agency. They would also likely require selling off real estate holdings, like the World Trade Center, to help cover the cost and delaying other projects the Port Authority had planned for the next decade, several commissioners said.

“I’m concerned about whether they took a fine enough pencil to this,” Chairman John Degnan, who has championed a new bus terminal, said after the meeting. “I don’t think anyone went out and intentionally inflated the numbers here, but I do hope the options we heard today could be delivered a lot more cheaply.”

An outside consultant who helped develop the cost estimates told commissioners that the numbers were “accurate or reasonably accurate” and described the unique requirements that would drive up costs. The steel plates, for example, that are needed to support the building and the 20- to 30-ton buses that would drive through it are the heaviest structural beams in the world, heavier than those needed for skyscrapers, and manufactured only in the United States and Europe, said Mark Gladden of the firm Skanska. And the project, as proposed, would have to be built while keeping the nearby bus operation moving, requiring staging facilities and the construction of a temporary station as part of some of the options — all amid one of the most congested areas of Manhattan and on top of some of the priciest real estate in the world.

That didn’t satisfy New York Commissioner Kenneth Lipper, a Wall Street executive, who said he believed the estimates were inflated. Lipper was the only New York commissioner who spoke out forcefully in favor of a new bus terminal in the meeting, joining three New Jersey commissioners. The bus terminal is largely considered a project that would benefit mostly New Jersey commuters.

“I feel these numbers are subject to challenge,” Lipper said of the costs, adding that outside experts he consulted told him the amounts set aside for contingency and consultants and engineers far exceeded the norm. One transportation advocate also joined the dispute over the accuracy of the numbers. Veronica Vanterpool, executive director of the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, said in the public comments that she had seen a “troubling trend” of government officials exaggerating the cost of mass transit projects as a justification for killing them. And she said these estimates — more than twice as expensive as the $4 billion World Trade Center transportation hub downtown — “raised eyebrows.”

At the end of her speech, Degnan said, “Amen.”

But New York Commissioner and Vice Chairman Scott Rechler, who proposed considering a bus terminal in New Jersey, said the estimates were “very preliminary.”

“So I think as the concept is refined,” Rechler said, “we’ll be better positioned to figure out what the true costs are.”

He added: “We need to think beyond our current area here. We have to think about the other side of the Hudson.”

He had few specifics, but said perhaps the bus terminal could be linked to a rail line into Manhattan, potentially a proposal for a new Amtrak tunnel that would run under the Hudson River. Degnan said he was open to considering it, but the idea of forcing bus commuters to trade in a single-seat ride into midtown Manhattan for bus-train transfer “makes the proposal problematic.”

Source: NorthJersey.com